The Shape of the App

Far Table is built around one idea: use the books, modules, and hand-drawn maps you already own. Nothing in it asks you to buy your adventure again in a new format, redraw it in a map editor, or learn a tool that only understands its own art. You photograph the page in front of you and play on it.

That idea explains the whole shape of the app. There are three tabs and nothing else. Whatever you are doing, you are on Session, Atlas, or Play, and they sit in a row along the bottom of the screen in that order. Learn what lives in each one and the rest of this manual is just detail.

From a printed page to a playable dungeon

As DM, a map out of a printed adventure becomes a working dungeon crawl in about five to ten minutes, and the app is designed so that stays true on a phone, on a couch, the night before the game. The path is short:

• Photograph the page and drag the four corners square, so a book shot at an angle comes out flat. Chapter 8, Adding Maps.
• Tap inside each room and corridor. The printed ink is the walls already, so the selection spreads across the floor and stops at the lines the publisher drew. Chapter 9, Preparing a Battle Map: Define Space.
• Cut doors into those walls, and drop light sources where the torches and braziers are. Chapter 10, Doors and Lights.
• Place the monsters and start the encounter. Chapter 13, The Map Prep Workbench.

What your players get is not a picture of a map. It is a lit space with fog of war: light and sight stop at the walls, closed doors block both, and each token sees only the room it is standing in. Chapter 28, Sight, Light, and Fog, is the full account.

Hand-drawn maps and digital map art take the same path, with a different first step. The chooser in chapter 9 has a method for each.

Remote, hybrid, or both

Every player's device shows the same revealed world, so it does not matter where the people are.

• Fully remote. Everyone is in a different house, on a voice call, each looking at their own screen.
• Hybrid. Some of you are around one physical table, the rest are at a distance. The people in the room keep their own devices, and they see exactly what the distant players see.

There is no lesser seat. Far Table carries maps, reveals, dice photos, and combat. It does not carry voice, so keep your usual call running alongside it.

One thing is coming rather than here: a dedicated big-screen view for the hybrid table, where a TV in the room shows the map and the current turn in place of miniatures. It is designed and on the roadmap; this chapter will document it when it ships.

Two hats, one layout

The DM and the players run the same three tabs, but they are not mirrors of each other. The DM's device is the table: it owns the campaign, decides what is revealed, and settles every request. A player's device holds only what the DM has handed over. Each section below says which hat it describes.

Session: the connection

As DM, this is where the night starts and stops. Before hosting it shows the campaign you have open, a card offering to pair your phone if you are on a Mac or Windows machine, a backup reminder, the "Show onboarding tips" checkbox, and the Start Hosting button. Once you are hosting it shows the join code in large type, a phonetic spelling of the last four characters so you can read it aloud, and a Players list that fills in as people arrive. The End button in the top bar appears only while you are on this tab. Chapter 14 covers hosting.

As a player, this is the join form first: session code, your name, your character, species, class, speed, darkvision. After you are in it becomes a status page with the session code, the party roster, and a Leave button in the top bar. Chapter 15 covers joining.

Atlas: everything you prepared

The Atlas is the campaign itself, and it works with or without a live session.

As DM it has four sub-tabs: Maps, Assets, Encounters, and Rules. Each has its own accent color, and each drills down two levels, from your chapter sections into the things inside them.

As a player it has three: Maps, Assets, and Rules. There is no Encounters tab, because encounters are the DM's prep and are never shown to players at all. Your Maps and Assets tabs hold exactly what the DM has revealed to you, and nothing else. Chapter 7 covers the Atlas in full.

Play: the live table

Play is where the game actually happens: the exploration map, the pins on it, dice photos, and combat.

As DM, when an exploration map is showing and no fight is running, the top bar's title is replaced by a Start Encounter button. A small red badge on the Play tab means a player has asked to move a token while you were looking somewhere else.

As a player, Play is your only battle surface. When a fight starts, the turn tracker appears over the same live map you were already looking at. There is no separate combat screen to find. Chapter 17 covers the Play tab, and chapter 24 covers your turn.

The bar across the top

The top bar follows one pattern for both hats. It shows the campaign name, plus the Atlas section you are drilled into. On the right there is a button that cycles the three themes and, on a Mac or Windows machine, a pairing status pill. The DM's bar adds one more thing: a pill that reads LIVE in green while a session is running and OFFLINE the rest of the time.

Where your campaign lives

On your device. That is the whole answer.

• There are no accounts, no sign-in, and no server holding your campaign.
• A DM's authored campaigns live in the campaign list on the device that made them.
• A player's revealed maps and handouts stay on that player's device after the session ends, browsable from Browse Offline with no network at all. Chapter 30 covers that.
• Nothing moves between devices unless you move it. Chapter 31 covers backup files and chapter 32 covers carrying a campaign to another device.

What we call the platforms

This manual names real hardware, never categories:

• Phone and tablet run the same layout. Panels dock over the bottom tab bar, and you long-press to open management menus.
• Mac and Windows run the desktop layout: a fixed side column beside the map, panels that float as their own windows, a toolbar across the top during combat, and right-click where a phone would long-press.

Everything else is identical. Same campaign format, same session model, same three tabs. Chapter 33 covers what desktop adds, and chapter 34 covers pairing a phone to it so you have a camera and dice.